COLUMN ONE : Waiting to Die at the AIDS Hotel : In this Bronx fleabag, the city houses the sick who have nowhere else to go. For many here, their hellish limbo is only broken up by the monthly disability check--and the drugs it can buy.

Come the first of every month, most people in the “AIDS Hotel” collect a U.S. government check for $520 and then get zooted to the limit on a hard run of crack. A day or two later, they are flat broke, returned to their hustling and begging and the grim, lonely task of surrendering to the plague.

They arrive at these lodgings from the extremities of life. Nearly all are drug addicts who once stashed themselves in fire-gutted buildings and unused subway tunnels and other nooks of the cityscape. They have come to the end of a lifetime’s many forking paths, now to choose what to do with a remnant year or so.

The crack-head Jose Loubriel is a tiny man made even smaller by cancer and pneumonia. He used to sleep on a tattered beach lounge chair in the abandoned electrical plant on Dyckman Street in Manhattan. “For warmth, I’d go to the subway trains, especially if the fevers and shakes were coming on,” he said.

Orlando Colon, a heroin addict, would curl up under a heavy quilt in the back of a ’74 Cadillac Fleetwood, marooned in the tall weeds of an empty lot. He had put the car up on cement blocks to keep the rats from jumping in.

“I was OK till it got towed away,” he said.

Only the onset of full-blown AIDS has ennobled these people with a private room. This city guarantees a bed to the homeless, but its group shelters are unfit for the AIDS-afflicted, their depleted immune systems imperiled by germs that ride the shared air. So places like the AIDS Hotel have become New York’s quirky amends for the twice-cursed by homelessness and a fatal virus.

Workers at the city’s Division of AIDS Services tell of people who repeatedly drop into their offices, looking worn, pleading for a room. To get one, however, they first need an M11Q Form signed by a doctor. The document shows that, through cancer or tuberculosis or some other internal rot, their case has passed a hazy line from the virus into the full syndrome.

With a completed M11Q finally in hand, the joy of an applicant is hard to contain. They return once more, this time waving that precious sheet of paper like a sweepstakes winner. “I’ve got it!” they shout. “I’ve got AIDS!”

*

The Concourse Residential Hotel is the place’s actual name, a five-story Bronx fleabag on the busy Grand Concourse just above 183rd Street. It is one of 34 SROs--single-room occupancy hotels--where this city shelters 1,719 of its AIDS-afflicted. For dreary lodgings that might commonly go for a third the price, New York pays $1,000 to $1,200 a month: $22 million a year. The SRO landlords have the leverage, what with housing so scarce and these tenants so unwanted.

Of course, a quiet home with a bed is what the sick and fragile need most of all. But in providing this comfort, the city is like a Good Samaritan doctor who supplies first aid only to be guilty of malpractice. Many of the SROs are little more than government-supported crack dens, a final spiritual dungeon for people burdened with emotional chaos and early death.

“Put someone in an SRO and even if their substance abuse is minimal, hands reach out in those dim hallways day and night to sell them drugs,” said Anita Vitale, the director of case management for the city’s AIDS division. “And who sends in the drug sellers? We do; they’re our clients.”

Across the United States, an estimated 10% to 15% of those living with acquired immune deficiency syndrome--or 10,700 to 16,100 people--are homeless, according to health economist Peter Arno, who has done a nationwide sampling. The numbers are steadily rising, as new medications prolong lives and as the epidemic shifts its aim toward the minority poor. A housing crisis looms.

More than 1 million Americans are generally thought to have the AIDS virus moldering within them; inevitably, their health will ebb into the full syndrome. In parts of the nation, particularly the Northeast, intravenous drug use has pulled ahead of sex among gay men as the leading source of new infections. Many of the addicted are already homeless.

The misbehaviors of such addicts--their many dodges and crimes--confound those who try to shelter them. These are people often hard to like and even harder to help. They are the modern-day rabble of an age-old moral dilemma: How much should a society do to help people who will not help themselves?

The answers have been made all the harder by budgetary restraints. A small federal program for AIDS housing did not even begin until last year. Providers are only now planning the first national conference on housing strategies.

New York’s SROs will not serve as exemplars, being such a curious mix of municipal generosity and wretched consequence. The Concourse is neither the best nor worst of them, notorious only to the neighbors who call it the AIDS Hotel. The building is otherwise without distinction, its pale brick front marred by haphazard scribbles of graffiti, like a page in a madman’s diary.

Of the 130 rooms, 107 are occupied by people with AIDS. There is no elevator, so they sluggishly ascend the stairs to the upper floors. The first level is reserved for transients or “short stay” guests--a convenient hot-sheets operation for prostitutes and their “dates.”

The rooms themselves are small and shabby, each lit by a lone fluorescent circle on the ceiling. The bedding is worn. The air is weary. Only half of the units have a stove and refrigerator. Bathrooms are down the hall, and many residents prefer a jug or bucket for their needs at night. They never know who might be roaming around on the other side of their door.

Management tries to keep the hotel safe. The front entrance is always locked, and only the desk clerk can buzz someone in. Guests are never allowed, unless they pay the $24 short-stay rate. This keeps out the combustible street life but also prevents visits from family and friends, people who might bring along the nourishment of a cup of soup or an hour of laughter and memories.

The determined sneak in anyway. Hookers living in the hotel instruct their customers to climb to the roof of the apartment house next door. From there, they can scale a tall, slanted fence topped with curls of barbed wire. A homeless man known as “Dog” sleeps on the rooftops and is an able guide.

There are no common areas in the SRO, just its narrow corridors and broad stairways. No sense of community exists, either. The prevailing ethics are the familiar ones of addiction: Those with drugs or cash are in control. Loyalty always bows to getting high. Conscience is scabbed over by expediency.

*

“This is a free-for-all kind of place,” said Greg Taylor, a master of cunning chatter and one of three loan sharks among the residents. His pay-back is double what he lends, double again for every day late. “Sometimes I hold your (ID) card, so I can be there when you cash your next check.”

The big $520, first-of-the-month Check Day is tied to Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a federal disability program. But some in the SRO only collect public assistance, usually $197 every two weeks. These collection days are staggered, pegged to the last digit on that ID card.

Everyone knows each other’s day. “It’s like ESP, as soon as you start smoking (crack), people are at your door knocking,” said crack-head Dana Suddler, who mimicked the freeloaders’ endless whining: “ ‘Please, I need a piece. C’mon, I always look out for you.’ ”

There is no rest from this pestering, people knocking at all hours, bumming change, pleading for a free hit on the pipe or volunteering to go to the corner to make a drug run. Acts of kindness are most often taken for weakness. “Offer people a plate of food, they think you’ve opened a restaurant,” said the heroin addict Nancy Hernandez.

Crack is the big drug, but a majority of the residents have a history with the needle and some still shoot up. The SRO is an arena for “dope fiend moves,” wily ways of conning someone, or “getting over,” to finagle the next high. The desperate sell the hotel’s towels to a nearby car wash for 50 cents each.

Weaker residents are always recruiting protectors. “Otherwise, people set you up, and I can’t keep track of my (drugs) when I’m smoking,” said Cheryl Jones, 35, an elfin woman who smokes crack on top of her methadone. “Even then, your friends turn on you. When they got, and you don’t, they forget you’re alive.”

Her first choice as a champion was that crafty Greg Taylor, but this ended after he smacked her around. “I caught her sneaking out with $20 while I was in the bathroom,” he said, providing a justification that exonerated him among the people of the AIDS Hotel.

*

In time, everyone’s street armor goes bad, often right along with the immune system. Even the robust have bedridden days; meanwhile, a few are all-too-clearly going under, their bowels rampant and their energy drained. Their cheeks have sunk into gullies. Fever and dementia are prickly companions.

John Santos, the good-natured ex-con in Room 322, seldom opens his door except to go to the toilet or the nearest store. He is lost in his clothes, shrinking in the bed. His weight has collapsed from 175 to 109.

Pneumonia had him hospitalized three times in the past year. During each absence, someone broke into his room and stole his TV, his pot and pan, his broom, even his dirty socks and underwear. He keeps little with him now.

Santos, 42, is finally off drugs. “They mess me up, like a signal going through my body, saying: Hey, stupid!” But the urge endures. “Drugs, when you’re homeless, is your reward for putting up with homelessness.”

A shrewd and gritty man, he has done a little of everything except drug dealing, which he has done a lot. Some days, the gloom crowds in on him. “I’m a 15-round fighter and I intend to take this thing to the finish, 15 years. But I’ll tell you, life is kicking my ass now. I’m not kicking it anymore.”

Once, his soul seemed to lift from his body and ask him to follow along. The invitation was oddly cheery, like a vaudeville act. But he was not ready.

Instead Santos battles on. Night sweats trouble his sleep, and he wakes up tangled in wet sheets as if he were melting. In a way, this is good. He has heard that 9 of 10 people die between the hours of 4 a.m. and 5 a.m., so he tries to get up like clockwork at 3:30 and not fall back asleep until 6.

By then, he feels much safer, knowing that when the sun appears, death is less likely to crawl beneath the covers and snuggle up beside him.

*

This AIDS comeuppance is so ghastly. Homelessness and addiction were awful enough. These people thought they had hit bottom only to learn they were yet in free-fall. They still have AIDS to pass through on the way to the grave.

That is the irony of the hotels. As bad as they are, they are more merciful than the streets. “I’ve never had a client who wouldn’t give anything to get into an SRO,” said Virginia Shubert, an advocate for the AIDS homeless.

John Santos used to sleep on the steps of the churches along splendid 5th Avenue. It was miserable to be sick out there, bundled up like a papoose, the icy wind carrying off his stamina. At times, he felt as if he were one colossal germ, with the smell of his wastes on him like a layer of skin.

He could have qualified for a hotel room months before last February, but during all his hospitalizations no one had told him the city had an AIDS department. “I’m grateful for the bed, even in a lousy Death Row like this,” he said. “But for $1,000 a month, the city is getting robbed.

“The whole thing is crazy. The government keeps shoving $500 into people’s pockets when they’re living in a drug nest. Isn’t that throwing gas in the fire?”

*

Upon moving in, the most basic decision is whether to steer away from the scene or go with the flow and smoke oneself senseless. Doctors suggest the former. They say drug use shortens an AIDS patient’s life, if not because of the drugs themselves, then because of drug-addled life. Addicts, neglectful of hygiene and nutrition, are a magnet for infections.

Anna Wooden, 33, had used crack on-and-off for a decade. When she came to the Concourse, she was slightly on, just emerging from eight months off. Her drugging could have gone up or down, like the temperature in the capricious spring weather. Pleased to have her own room, she assumed it would be down.

But the AIDS Hotel is miserly with such redemptions. The city has colonized it with drug addicts. Temptation is constant, submission nearly inevitable.

From Day 1, people had Anna figured as a crack-head. They paid her to make their drug buys. They gave her free hits. In less than a week, she was smoking more than ever and living check-to-check.

Her basic decision--her going with the flow--was simply reasoned: “You know you got AIDS, so you say, what the hell, do what you feel. Maybe everybody’s going to die sometime, but me, I’m going to die soon.”

*

Many at the hotel make this same heartfelt declaration: “I had a life once.” They are proud of what they were, once, somewhere, with someone. The memories pulse through them like the tingling in the stump of an amputee.

A few were mechanics, one a carpenter, another a nanny. Jose Loubriel had his own carpet-cleaning business. Greg Taylor danced striptease at a downtown club, with all those howling women jamming money down his jockstrap.

Some hold on to artifacts. Eleazar Rodriguez once played with Mongo Santamaria’s band and still has a trumpet. He practices the scales to keep his lips limber. “But I get this urge to cough on deep breaths, from the tuberculosis,” he said wanly. Anyway, the horn goes in and out of hock to keep him in cocaine.

Another man was once a minister (and he would rather keep his last name to himself). Gary is 39 now, nearly toothless, a servant of the almighty opiates, spiritually inside-out from his own hypocrisy. He keeps a Bible near his bed and is willing to help anyone find the faith that he himself has mislaid.

“Some have come to pray with me, but I realized later it was just their way of getting over,” he said. “I’m unworthy, anyhow. I don’t want people to say, ‘Who is he to talk about God when he is so without God himself?’ ”

By far, the most common artifacts are photos of children. Many in the SRO are parents, their kids fallen away during frantic times. Dana Suddler, 36, lost her sons after she nodded out at her outpatient drug program, the boys unable to rouse her and the staff looking on with alarm. The two of them are now in foster care.

“I ask myself: Why was I put on this Earth?” she said. “I always thought that my purpose was to raise my kids and have a good family, but I messed that up, didn’t I? You know, people are always saying, ‘If you love your sons, you’ll stop using drugs.’ But the one doesn’t relate to the other.”

Dana is a good housekeeper. Her clothes are clean. She crochets. Even when she works the Jerome Avenue whore stroll, her standards are higher than most. “My price doesn’t go lower than $10,” she said with genuine self-respect.

The authorities permit her to visit her sons, but she is rarely in a frame of mind to do so. “I bless God that they were taken away from me. They’re better off with someone else.”

Kieran, age 9, is a tall, rugged athlete. But Nelson, 6, is thin and frail, and, for him, Dana’s heart is awash in guilt. She passed him the virus in the womb, giving the boy his death right along with his life.

Psychic aching lies heavily across her gaunt face. “I love my sons so much, but all I do about it is smoke this s---,” she said, her self-respect now gone to vapor. “Do you know what I think? I think the only good that can happen to me is if I die before him. God willing, I want to go first.”

*

For the most part, boredom and melancholy take up what time is left from chasing the pipe. Many of the residents have no family members willing to remain in their lives--their spouses and parents long ago fed up with being fed up, unreachable now on the other side of the burned bridges.

Ignorance also plays a part. Some relatives are afraid the avenging angel AIDS will find them too. Alfredo Perez’s wife refuses to kiss him. “She heard on the news that the virus can be (found in) saliva,” he said. “She wasn’t paying attention. It’d take about a gallon to infect you.”

Jose Loubriel’s wife and their two children now live with her father. When Jose asked to go to Jose Jr.’s 11th birthday party, he was told to stay away. He glumly returned to his room and sat on the bed. Through the door he could be heard singing “Happy Birthday,” a withered snapshot of the boy in hand.

*

The disease is not often talked about. Conversation is about sex, drugs and buying and selling. The trade in cheap televisions is hectic. Without TV, the mind tends to wander into thought, and thinking is the worst thing of all.

When someone dies, however, the news skips along and then the power of AIDS is briefly acknowledged. Jim Harrington found his neighbor spread across the bed in Room 246. “The smell was getting worser for six days,” he said.

That is a common fear, that destiny demands they die alone and begin to rot before being missed. Actually, most deaths occur in hospitals. Ambulances cart off the gravely sick, and, if they die, word of it usually gets back to the hotel through the grapevine. There are no postings. Nor are there memorials.

When Renee Williams died recently, only a few people pondered the loss and then only with ripples of recollection: Her teeth were green, her body skeletal. Her favorite scam was to repack empty crack vials with “dummies” made of soap. She had a kid--or was that two kids?--living with a sister.

“Renee was no worse than anyone else,” said Mark Manderson, who was her friend, on and off. At the end, she rarely left her room after her money was smoked up. “She was waiting for Check Day and didn’t want to be bothered.”

But Check Day sometimes seemed hopelessly far off. So the feeble, rudderless woman would dizzily shamble through the halls, pleading for something to smoke or, at the least, something to eat.

*

The loan shark Greg Taylor, 39, has been at the Concourse for 18 months and is a man of many businesses. He sells hot TVs, crack, whatever comes his way. He also pimps on occasion, installing a prostitute right in his room.

Greg’s voice is scratchy, like a cheap radio, but he knows how to end his sentences--even the threats--with a friendly laugh. No one trusts him, yet his guile is so lacquered with charm that he wins people over. Also, he has cash.

“What’s different about me is I haven’t let the sloth dig in,” he said, smug about his hustles. The main spigot of his cash flow is panhandling on the subway. He can pick up $40 in an hour or two, though the work is tiring. “Nobody gives me money,” he said. “I have to go out and beg for it.”

Greg was handsome once, but now his mouth has only two discolored teeth in its upper row, spread wide apart like the 7-10 split in bowling. His chest is pocked and rutted from shingles. He uses this unsightly scarring as his main prop on the trains.

“My name is Gregory Taylor and I am dying of full-blown AIDS,” he says. “Ladies and gentlemen, if you don’t believe I’m for real, the proof is on my body.” Up comes his shirt, all that flaking skin now in people’s faces.

He rides the subway to 125th Street, reciting this same routine, word for word, as he moves car to car. Coins add up fast in his plastic jar.

Then, if he feels flush enough with capital, he hurries home in a taxi.

*

The AIDS virus demands some personal responsibility. To stop its spread, the infected should not engage in unprotected sex or share dirty needles. It is a maxim honored by some and disobeyed with a curious wrath by others.

People rarely know for sure who gave them the illness. In trying to pinpoint the fateful moment, blame is affixed to all sorts of odd memories.

Jackie Edwards, 30, is another self-forsaken woman who rents her body to strangers. She believes she got the virus from a $15 date who, in parting, wrenched a smile from his stone heart and remarked: “You’re going to die.”

That eerie comment continues to haunt her. In turn, her own conscience has become an arid patch of territory. “This virus makes you hate the whole world,” she said. “If I got it, ain’t no reason to keep it to myself.”

AIDS can become the ultimate game of tag: I’m it, you’re it. Jackie suffers the shakes, and spots erupt on her arms. Strange white matter collects in her throat. Yet on the street, the men still gawk at her thighs beneath her see-through dresses.

Recently, she brought a date up on the rooftop and gave him a long session, but instead of the agreed-on $20 price he produced only $4 and change. She had no way to get even until he asked, “You ain’t got no diseases, do you?”

It was Jackie’s turn to smile. “You’re in the AIDS Hotel,” she said.

*

The Concourse is unusual among the SROs in that two social workers are headquartered on the first floor. This is an experiment by Enter Inc., a not-for-profit group, and it has improved things in ways large and small.

The workers have helped many residents find apartments or coaxed them into drug programs. They urge the sick to take their medications. They communicate with city caseworkers, oiling the gears of a cranky bureaucracy. More than anything, they are a sympathetic presence, two people not trying to get over.

Archie Van Putten is in charge. Once an addict himself, he often speaks with the rousing singsong of a good preacher. “It’s hard to inject spirit when people have nothing to be spiritual about,” he said. “The system gives these people a place to cry, but it doesn’t end the reasons for crying.”

Those reasons go beyond drugs and AIDS. Most people here were long ago lost in their own inner geography. They feel disposable. When they do seek help, the social services system responds in ways that are baffling and demeaning, with its ratty SROs, overburdened caseworkers and endless rules and paperwork.

The social contract in America is torn at both ends. The poor feel they are owed more and more entitlements and better service to boot. And the rest of society resents their ingratitude in the face of a huge tax burden, its heartfelt sense of compassion and responsibility having long ago leaked away and its aid now given grudgingly and only from a safe distance.

*

With the social workers’ help, the rogue Greg Taylor is finally moving out. He found an apartment in Brooklyn. The change is undoubtedly bad for his many businesses, except panhandling. The subways will be able to sustain him.

Most of his hustles at the hotel were also hustles on himself, he admitted before packing up. This was his coping strategy. He needed others to believe he was in control. Even more, he wanted to think of himself that way too.

But only the disease has a firm hand on the controls. It has spilled away his time and robbed him of possibilities. “What scares me is when I see people in the final stages,” Greg said. “I don’t know if I can accept that.”

The street hustler paused a moment to ponder this further. He had a concluding thought. “I might kill myself,” he said.

*

A resident found a diary inside his dresser drawer. He did not read English well, so he gave the notebook away. There was only a little writing anyhow, the private thoughts of some earlier unfortunate in the AIDS Hotel.

The journal read in part:

“The woman in my life was Linda Blue and my son is Jamal. I will always have love for Linda and Jamal. I have not seen them since 1987, but my thoughts will be with them for always and always.

“The world is a cold place, Jamal. Love your mother and love the ones who love you. You was a good baby. I hope you grow up to be a good man and look out for Linda. I myself hope that this is not the end.

“I am looking to find myself now. It is a hell of a thing when you cannot love yourself. That is to let you know, my son, how lost I am. I feel like I am all by myself. I hope you never have to go through what I have to go through in this day or time. We get to look inside ourselves sometimes to see what is going on in the mind and it is ugly. But there is no escape.”

Tomorrow: Check Day